Reception rooms in Henley's Georgian and Victorian townhouses almost always centre on a chimney breast, and that is exactly where most clients want the television and media storage to sit. Doing that well means solving two problems at once: building joinery that respects the room's original proportions and mouldings, and getting the cables, sockets and ventilation for the equipment into the wall before the units go anywhere near it. Get the sequence wrong and you end up with a visible cable trailing down a listed cornice or a plug socket in the wrong place behind a fixed panel.
Riverside living rooms bring a different version of the same challenge. These are often longer, more open spaces with large glazing, where a media wall becomes one of the main architectural features of the room rather than a piece tucked into an alcove. A run of that length needs setting out that stays dead straight over its full width, and equipment bays with enough ventilation for AV gear that will otherwise overheat behind a closed sprayed door.
We coordinate the electrics for every media unit with the qualified electrician we work with, agreeing socket positions, aerial and data points and lighting circuits before first fix happens, so nothing has to be chased into finished plaster afterwards. The joinery itself is drawn in CAD, showing the elevation and equipment layout, then built and sprayed in our Ipsden workshop before it comes to site. Where a chimney breast forms part of a listed building's protected fabric, any consent needed to alter it is the homeowner's responsibility to check with South Oxfordshire District Council before we finalise the design.
